Claire Schooley's Blog

At Forrester, we think of strategic talent management as made up of four pillars: Recruiting, Performance (including succession and career development), Learning, and Compensation, which sit on top of the core HR system that manages employee records and transactions. These four pillars of HRM (human resource management) have taken on critical importance in the past year. Organizations find talent that they must bring up to full productivity as quickly as possible. Leaders want to make sure employees have performance goals and appropriate formal and informal training to help them meet these goals. For those strong performers, variable compensation rewards their work efforts. Technology is available to automate all these processes, but up until this year, few vendors provided functionality in all four strategic HRM pillars.

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A New York Times article, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” written last summer has stayed with me as I continue to talk with clients about the Millennials and how they approach work life. This article talks about the new growing-up phase of today’s Millennials as a distinct life stage called “emerging adulthood” and relates it to “adolescence,” which was a new term 100 years ago when 12- to 18-year-olds began staying in school instead of starting to work at 12 or 13. Many young people in their early 20s are not following the path of past generations — graduate high school, go on to college, graduate, find a job, marry, start a family, and eventually retire. Rather, 40% of today’s Millennials move back home at least once, have many jobs as well as romantic relationships in their 20s, travel, do what appears like nothing, and go back to school. They are exploring and feel no need to rush to make work or personal commitments. They are the product of their Baby Boomer parents who, although they worry about their children making it on their own, provide support and encourage them to find what’s right for them. Millennials as children were encouraged to explore as they participated in a variety of sports, drama, music, and other enriching children-focused activities during and after school. It’s not surprising that they now want to explore many career and life options and don’t feel any obligation to follow the traditional approaches to adulthood. We also see government regulations allowing parents to keep their children on their health insurance until they are 26.